Hajar Press, Maqam Books and Mosaic Rooms are delighted to invite you to the first London launch of October, the debut collection by Lebanese poet Nur Turkmani. Nur will be joined in conversation by editor Farhaana Arefin.

In these spare and soulful poems, Nur Turkmani reflects on transformation and loss over six Octobers in Lebanon since 2019. Moving between love and grief for home and its people, October holds the ordinary and the extraordinary in the same breath, asking how we hold what’s disappearing, or changing too quickly to make sense of.

Nur Turkmani is a writer from Beirut. Her work appears in Poetry, New England Review, Copper Nickel, The Rumpus and others. Her debut poetry collection, October, was published by Hajar Press in 2026. She was awarded the Anthony Veasna So Scholarship for fiction from The Adroit Journal.

Farhaana Arefin is the publisher and managing director at Hajar Press, an independent political publishing house by and for people of colour, which she co-founded in 2020. She is the editor of the elements anthology series, of which the first volume, The Hajar Book of Rage, was published in 2025.

Visit the Mosaic Rooms website to book a free ticket.